by Peter Orner
“Heroic?”
“Yes. Biblically heroic.”
“What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d walk.”
“To not get shot by Germans? Yeah, I’d probably walk.”
“Is that heroic?”
“Slightly.”
“You see, he’s always making things into a poem. Seventy years later, the Boers took a kid and shoved his mouth into the exhaust pipe of a helicopter. What happened?”
“What?”
“It blew him apart. They found pieces of him ten K’s away. Was the boy a hero?”
“Is this an argument?”
“Was the boy a hero or not?”
“That wasn’t a choice. There’s a difference, that’s all I’m saying.”
“And I’m saying it’s a part of a continuum. Which will keep on happening as long as old stupid men tell stories of how heroic it is to be murdered.”
She stands up, brushes herself off like she’s leaving early. She never leaves early. Neither of us ever leaves early.
“You’re leaving?”
“Is having your mouth shoved into an exhaust pipe biblically heroic or not?”
“Are you asking me if there are any helicopters in the Bible?”
“There are chariots.”
“So how would you tell Waterberg?”
“I would say it was a military strategy. That the Hereros meant to live to fight another day.”
“With no ammunition and no water? With women and children? Isn’t that as much of a fantasy as that they were heroes?”
“Yes—but at least then the guru can’t cry for them. The way I see it, they still had it in their minds to murder back the Germans.”
“Will you guest-lecture?”
“No.”
“Will you come here?”
“No.”
106
GRAVES
I see them now. I get it.”
She’s picking at the skin between her toes. She won’t look at me. “Feeling sorry isn’t seeing them,” she says.
“Not feeling sorry. I’m only saying there’s something to be said for letting the land kill you rather than the Germans.”
“Listen. The myth is a lie. As soon as you tell it, you can’t see it anymore. For it to be—I don’t say mean, I say be—you don’t talk it, you just see it. Try, try and imagine it.”
“I’m trying.”
“See them?” Mavala whispers. “They’re so delirious they can no longer remember where the secret boreholes are, and the ones that are known to the Germans are patrolled by soldiers with orders to kill. So they start to dig—anywhere. No divining rod, no intuition. They aren’t even thirsty anymore. There’s only something in their throats that feels like a scream. And so they dig, the people dig. And what happens?”
I sit up and grab her arm, pull her hand away from her feet.
“They dug their own graves. I get it.”
“No. You’re going too fast. When they started to claw that ground, they were looking for the water that might be down there. I’m talking about the moment they understood what they’d built—not when they got down into it. I’m talking about when they looked down into the hole. What did they see?”
107
ABRAM
He lived for a few months up near Auntie and her whelps. His toes poked out of his shoes. One side of his face was caved in. It could have been from a rifle butt or a bullet, but he made no claims to either. He arrived like other castaways before him. He said he was a farmhand, that he’d lived all his life on a farm near Khorixas. After the elections, his baas sold out and left him with nothing and nowhere to live. It was another familiar story. He’d trekked south to Goas. The priest gave him a job helping Theofilus with the goats.
Nobody believed him. His command of languages made us suspicious. There wasn’t a language in the country he couldn’t speak. He could talk to every boy at Goas in his mother tongue, and for this he was soon famous. Some days he’d lead the goats to the courtyard, careful to keep them off Ireland, and stand and talk, ringed by a group of boys begging him to speak to them personally.
He also spoke Portuguese.
What choice did we have but to gossip? A farmhand as far south as Khorixas speaking Portuguese? It was all anybody needed. It put him on the border during the war. And if he was on the border during the struggle—and he didn’t want to boast about it—there was only one answer to the question of what he’d been doing up there. He’d been a stooge.
At first, nobody made anything of it. The war was still too close. He wasn’t the only one at Goas hiding something. And the man seemed to know his place now. He was doing his penance, like any honest traitor would. To the Church, to God, to whomever. His toes poked out of his shoes. Someone had caved his face in. Now he watched goats look for something to swallow during a drought. How much lower can a man descend?
The principal didn’t see it this way. But whether Abram had sold out freedom fighters during the struggle didn’t matter to him. What bothered the principal was the possibility that the new shepherd might be smarter than he was. He couldn’t have some farmhand wearing his head so high. Obadiah could very well be brilliant—if that’s what being brilliant is like—so long as he remained a foolish drunk. This new Abram only drank cooldrink. The problem, though, was that as an employee of the Church, Abram wasn’t his to banish.
“Teacher Festus?”
“Yes, Master Sir?”
“Would you step into my office a moment?”
“With pleasure.”
It didn’t take our lovable henchman long. We were drinking by the fire. It was a Saturday night. After a few lagers, Festus said, “Abram?”
“Teacher?”
“I have a curiosity.”
“Yes?”
“We live in a new nation, am I correct?”
“Yes, Teacher.”
“One in which it is possible for a man to rise?”
“I suppose so, Teacher.”
“Then I must ask you this: Why do you remain a slave? You don’t want to do more than tend goats? Comrade Nujoma says we must all do our share. Brother, why are you still asleep?”
Someone stoked the fire by nudging it with a shoe. Abram didn’t make a sound with his mouth. He seemed to be laughing from somewhere deep down in his stomach. It was unsettling. We hadn’t heard him laugh before. He took a long gulp of his Pepsi. Then he laughed with his mouth. He wasn’t a big man, but his laugh in the dark made him seem like one. We took a step back from the fire. Finally, I thought, someone’s going to murder Festus.
“It’s interesting to be asked such a question by a black man such as you seem to be, Teacher,” Abram said.
Someone murmured, Amen.
Then Abram tossed his Pepsi on the fire (half full, it sizzled) and stepped away into the night. We listened to his slow steps across the rocks. When he was out of earshot, Festus was bold again.
“See the way he threatens? Isn’t it obvious?” Festus paused and sucked his teeth. “The man’s an assassin.”
“Who’s he here to kill?”
“I place my vote for Master Sir.”
“No, better the priest. Better to keep the devil we know —”
“No, let them live. Auntie.”
“Yes, Auntie!”
“All in favor say aye?” Pohamba said.
Chorus of ayes, with one mouth silent.
“Vilho?”
“All right. Auntie,” Vilho said. “In certain circumstances, even the Lord would condone —”
Obadiah squeezed my elbow. “Who wasted an honest beer?”
“It’s Pepsi. Abram’s.”
“Ai, die Pepsi.”
Even so. Assassin? Doesn’t the word itself carry its own hiss of truth? And don’t rumors have a way of overcoming the artlessness of their spreader? So it was born. Abram, the new farmhand, had been in the pay of the Boers, a member of a hit squad during the war. Ferreting o
ut traitors never gets dull. And didn’t they train him well? Who better than a champion linguist? What part of the country couldn’t the man infiltrate? And why else would someone have caved his face in like that? There he is in the courtyard. The murderer. Look at the man now. Goats, he tends goats. Safe in the doorways of our classrooms, the boys are silently laughing, their mouths opening and closing like mocking fish.
I wonder now if fear would have been easier for him to take. That man standing there in those raggy shoes, bewildered. He seemed to like Pohamba and me. He used to come by the quarters with some of his home brew and share it with us. But in the end we weren’t any more helpful to him than Festus.
Even Mavala said it was probably true about Abram, and if not that, something else. She was writing a lesson plan, a notepad propped on her knees. Sometimes she was practical with our time. I groped her. She fended me off.
“What do you mean?”
“Oh, anything. Maybe he hit his wife. Maybe he kicked a dog.”
“So he pays for it this way?”
She didn’t look up from her writing.
“There’s been worse injustice, no?”
Thursday, and the skeletal goats wander into the grassless courtyard alone. The last we hear of Abram, he’s working day labor at the gravel pit near Pawkwas.
108
GRAVES
Antoinette would say that we’d been cavorting in the stench of sin. She wouldn’t be surprised, or blame us. She expected it. She expected it of everybody. What else do people do but ultimately degrade themselves? She’d say we have as much control over our sinning as we do against the wind, because we are born to it—unless every day, every hour, every minute, we are vigilant. She made no claims to being any better. She was only a humble servant of the Lord and of boys. Because defeating the devil is merely work. And since we were lazy, since we wanted only to enjoy, it was only a matter of time before we would cave in to his desires. Afternoons of shut-up rooms and Mavala and me out there. You couldn’t call it an escape, because we didn’t go far and we didn’t go long and we didn’t close our eyes and we didn’t care about our knees in the sand or the rocks in our backs, or even the sun-dried goat shit, nothing.
“Like a couple of baboons in the veld.”
“As if this farm didn’t have any beds!”
“The girl who fought in the struggle, the one with the baby and —”
“Yesssss! I remember. And the volunteer. From where was that volunteer?”
Us becoming a story, then, if not much of one—we were only an hour a day on weekdays, an hour and fifteen minutes if we were bold. Still, something people might tell years from now just because it was something to tell. It made us feel slightly famous.
What did the kid see when he saw us fucked-out, sweat-glazed, the sun lashing us and we’re too tired to move? The last thing I remember before we slept was that Mavala splayed her toes and grasped some sand and threw it with her foot at Grieta—and then we both were out. We had it down. Eight minutes of sleep before Tomo air-raided us. And then the footfall, and I wake up and see the kid running backward, the face of my Standard Six Magnus Axahoes—disgusted? sad?—and then him whirling around, his untucked shirt flapping like a cape.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
“No. Why would it matter?”
109
POHAMBA
Dead center of a Sunday, Pohamba singing in the shower, doorless shower, trickly spigot. Hot water rare. It spouts forth now only in the middle of the day, when it’s the last thing you want, but since it’s so rare, you’ve got to love it. The rapture of wasting water in a drought. Pohamba slathered up and screeching Please, please, please, please.
On a rock near the spigot, a Standard Four waits, a bored valet. Over his arm, a towel; in his hand, a cup of cold tea.
110
GRAVES
Lonely hot afternoon and our shoes, all four of them, in a line on the grave. Us shoulder to shoulder on the tablecloth.
She tries to scratch her back.
“Will you?”
I shift around and scratch her.
“Harder,” she says.
“You go,” I say.
“What?”
“Tell something. Anything. What about your mother?”
“I haven’t seen her in five years.”
“Tell me —”
“She loves handbags. Or at least she used to.”
“Handbags.”
“Yes, my mother always said a lady should never be seen in public without a handbag. Even at the market at Ondangwa, where there weren’t any of the ladies she was talking about. What ladies was she talking about? My sister and I walked around like queens because my father was an assistant headman, because he worked in an office. A sell-out, my father. But I loved the market. Bream fish, barbell fish, sour milk. Dry beans, cassava, cabbage. The fat koeks in the bubbling oil. All I wanted on earth was a fat koek in greasy paper. That first bite was like eating a peach, only better. And one was never enough. Sometimes Tuyeni gave me half of hers.”
“Tell me more.”
“Don’t stop. Keep scratching.”
“Go on.”
“She never let go of our wrists. Always so many men around. And they letched the assistant headman’s daughters. Men. There are always, everywhere, so many men. Have you noticed?”
“I notice here.”
“And there was a war, and still my mother walked around as if she never heard of it. Four years later I was gone. Tuyeni says after I left, my mother wouldn’t be seen in the market. Went off where? To fight for whom? An assistant headman’s daughter?”
“And Tuyeni?”
“What about her?”
“Your sister.”
“Wife now, not sister.”
111
GRAVES
Sharing a bag of crisps. I’m trying to share. Mavala’s munching most of them, in between repainting her toenails. I’m loving the smell of the polish.
“Nothing else?” she says. “Your entire life?”
“All right. I remember running through an airport once. I was about to miss a plane. There was a woman in front of me, young, she had a kid with her. Maybe he was five. She was late for the same plane and was trying to run with the kid, but it wasn’t working. I came up behind them and took the kid’s other hand, and we held him up in the air as we ran. The kid was loving it, him flying and he hasn’t even gotten on the plane yet. The whole time we didn’t say a word.”
“This is what you remember of your life?”
“Basically.”
“Did you make it to the plane?”
“Yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“That was it. She thanked me. I think I bowed. I never saw her again.”
“You bowed?”
“Why not? Why not bow?”
“Daddy, husband, alone—how long did that take?”
“About four minutes. Come back with me.”
“Where?”
“I’ll get a job, go to graduate school. I’ve got to do something.”
“Me? What will I do?”
“You could go to school. You said you wanted to go back to school. You could study accounting again.”
“Tomo?”
“Of course.”
“Our volunteer has gone amuck.”
“Why?”
“Start with the visa problem. The other thing is, well, the kid does hate you.”
“I knew it. The whole time —”
“A joke, Davey! He bites what he loves.”
“So we get married. Goas could use a wedding.”
She nearly hyperventilates, gulps air and holds her stomach, writhes around in the sand. And Tomo—as if he hasn’t been asleep, as if he’s heard every word—starts right then to rev up the siren on the other side of the tombs.
“Hand me the polish.”
“Why?” she says.
“I want to smell it harder.”
�
�Don’t be jealous.”
“Of who?”
She looks away. Then, with her eyes half-closed, kisses me.
“Tell me.”
“Isn’t it time?”
112
GRAVES
The dry yellow veld is moving. It takes a long stare to see that it’s a herd of springbok leaping, as one. No one can take this away from me. Because it’s real. It’s grace. The Green Hills of Africa. There isn’t a green hill in this entire country. Who needs green anything? The springbok are leaping toward the long shadows of the Erongos.
“Look,” I say.
She watches for a while. We’re out of the dagga I stole from Pohamba’s new stash. We’re sharing her last van Ryn. Her knees under the tablecloth are like small bumps. Tomo’s on the edge of awake. I can hear him, his pre-wake snorfle. He’s onto us now. Mavala’s bribes have become less effective. Yesterday, after she topped his pap with cinnamon and brown sugar, he knocked it over.
She hands me the last nub of cigarette.
“What? You want to go on safari? They have these tours out of Windhoek, why don’t you —”
“Fuck off.”
She lifts her neck a little and holds it toward the sun with her eyes closed.
“Three yet?”
She doesn’t answer.
The sun belligerent, slackless. She rolls over on her back and talks. “Up at the camp we used to hunt springbok in the jeep, drunk off peach schnapps. We wouldn’t shoot. It was part of the game not to shoot. You had to separate one from the herd and ram it down. Someone in the unit learned it from a Boer farmer. A good thing about the Boers. You can always blame your sins on them. Springbok have the tenderest meat. They say it tastes better when it’s bloody, but that’s a lie.”
“Did you get this from Pohamba?”
I watch her. She digs the nail of her thumb into her cheek.
“It wasn’t easy. You know, buck zigzag. You had to be careful not to hit trees. Harder because we did it at night, without lights, because the planes patrolled —”
